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Mazz posted:My suggestion, if you spend more than 66% of your starting income on one unit type, a little icon appears next to your name of that unit type. Apply this for the first 2 minutes of gameplay too so you can't skate around it by deploying after the clock starts. Wouldn't this leave you with the issue of wondering if they bought heavy APCs or helicopters as their transports, though? If it just said "majority infantry" that doesn't really help you prepare for a wall of transport hinds if you were expecting BTR70s (or vice-versa). 40% gunships/40% infantry in helicopters/20% other would also be an issue, but you might be able to cover that by changing from > 66% to just "whichever category they spent the most on, probably excepting logistics". I like this idea otherwise!
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Jul 29, 2016 19:27
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I think you can solve that with just bundling by the transport and not the unit type, infantry in helos should count as helos since that's what matters. APC rushes aren't very scary anymore since so many things delete them well outside their effective range. There's very few APCs that are truly frightening in that capacity, and almost all are priced accordingly such that you won't walk over most good starts with that kind of strict loadout. Helos differ because they outright beat most classes of units except a specific few hard counters. They also move wayyyyyy faster then any ground attack. Or since you'll have to make classes for this regardless, just bundle everything helicopter into that class, regardless of what it carries. It's not perfect, I don't think anything will be, but it's a good way to reveal the most obvious rushes without doing drastic stuff like allowing full vision of deployments or changing the entire opening mechanic. Also, an addendum, it needs to work such that the icon appears as points are spent, not as the game starts or at a specific time. Otherwise people will just figure out how to game it like always. It needs to be pretty foolproof: as you spend points, you add up on the counter, you can rearrange and remove the icon, but as soon as you go over it shows. Also the exact amount is completely debatable, 66% just seemed like a good starting point. Mazz fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Jul 29, 2016 |
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Jul 29, 2016 20:01
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Oh don't get me wrong I'm not trying to claim to be an expert on competitive wargame; I'm actually terrible which is why I mostly just stick to mod tool nonsense. My point was more that if you buy a bunch of gun AA and then they bring nothing but ground units that's going to be a subpar engagement for you, even if the APCs normally aren't very threatening on their own. Showing the transport as the type for the icon (or just along with the infantry icon) would probably cover that issue, though.
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Jul 29, 2016 21:08
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Hey I got a question I hope you guys can help me with. My game kind of suddenly stopped working, like the escape button doesn't really bring up the menu and when building a deck double clicking a unit doesn't add it. I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it but still it's broken. Any advice on how to fix it, if anyone has run into a similar problem
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Jul 30, 2016 08:23
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power crystals posted:Oh don't get me wrong I'm not trying to claim to be an expert on competitive wargame; I'm actually terrible which is why I mostly just stick to mod tool nonsense. My point was more that if you buy a bunch of gun AA and then they bring nothing but ground units that's going to be a subpar engagement for you, even if the APCs normally aren't very threatening on their own. Showing the transport as the type for the icon (or just along with the infantry icon) would probably cover that issue, though. When I played my hedge against helo rushes was to bring about 6-8 of the cheaper shilkas and use that as my starting AA net because i'm not that concerned about ATGM snipers and SEAD planes in the opening and that's usually the death of the cheaper gun AA. Of course, I usually did helo rushes myself because in RD if you're going to be aggressive in the opening you need helos given the map size and the east germans weren't too bad at it.
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Jul 30, 2016 11:54
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The best solution would really be to create locked theme decks, or at least themed decks with much more restrictive options. If the dude takes the "Air Assault" deck it would both broadcast a bit of warning that he's probably rolling choppers and at the same time set some sane limits to the numbers/types of choppers he'll be rolling in with. It's really the only way to prevent the samey min/max and FoTM decks, anyways.
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Jul 31, 2016 17:10
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Just for clarification purposes, a chopper rush isn't when you rush infantry in choppers and seize important cap zones. It's when you mass gunships and kill all the other teams CVs in 180 seconds.
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Jul 31, 2016 18:01
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Dave47 posted:Zerg rushing / peon rushing has always been a thing, and doesn't make RTS games "fundamentally broken." Besides, it sounds like this was a hybrid competitive tourney / community building event. The latter may be the issue. In the replay I saw Random and mate were running MI17 with strela, their opponents called in a bunch of challenger Marksman AA and left them in the open. From EE where helo rushing was much more prevalent, missile were a better counter as their damage is AOE, stun locking helos 1 for 1 with shilka/M163s was pretty ineffective when there is a swarm of high HP choppers around. Plus they did not even hide the aa units in trees/buildings like you had to in ee and in Red Dragon. Edit, thinking about it I wonder if helo rushing is actually more viable in RD as competitive games are conquest and most maps lack the "centre Spawn" control points of ALB/EE. In destruction games you can actually really hurt a helo rush opening by trading well in points lost, in conquest it's far more binary, especially when helo rushs can concentrate 2 v 1. Bastables fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 22:17
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I don't really Wang to pay this anymore but is there a cast anyone doing out there anymore?
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Aug 2, 2016 23:21
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I'd like to see assault guns differentiated from tank destroyers more.
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Aug 4, 2016 21:18
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Yay new nations! Kind of hilarious that Finland is a redfor country though?
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Aug 7, 2016 23:08
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They demanded it. And gently caress, the Yugoslavian nationalism. I thought that was a Paradox-forums only thing 
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Aug 7, 2016 23:16
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I really wanted SADF, I have no opinion on the Netherlands, but I would rather have had Italy instead of the Dutch, because then you could make a Yugoslavia-Italy campaign
Top Hats Monthly fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Aug 8, 2016 |
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Aug 8, 2016 00:33
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Add in Austria to the mix as well and you'll have a good set for some post-Tito unfuckery of the balkans.
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Aug 8, 2016 08:49
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Add Großdeutschland as a coalition. 
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Aug 8, 2016 13:15
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Alpine axis: Austria, West Germany and Italy on the same coalition.
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Aug 8, 2016 13:53
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Arglebargle III posted:Add Großdeutschland as a coalition. I've long been arguing for a reunified Germany faction with East and West German equipment.
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Aug 8, 2016 18:10
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East Germany, West Germany, Austria, Czech, Poland, France.
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Aug 8, 2016 18:36
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Arglebargle III posted:East Germany, West Germany, Austria, Czech, Poland, France. USSR, Yugoslavia
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Aug 8, 2016 19:09
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Are there any mods for this that would let 3 people have a free-for-all battle?
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Aug 11, 2016 18:11
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Uralmod dead? I've been trying to play lately and this vanilla poo poo is unbearable.
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Aug 17, 2016 00:31
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reagan posted:Uralmod dead? I've been trying to play lately and this vanilla poo poo is unbearable. I hope not and will do whatever work can be meaningfully pawned off on me to make it happen if someone who's familiar with the build process can help.
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Aug 17, 2016 00:45
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Last I heard from RangerPL was that with Eugen committing to new nation packs, keeping the mod updated is kidna pointless as each update terribly breaks the mod and porting it forward is not possible due to database number changes. Also doesn't help that it seems that every time it was updated Eugen would patch and gently caress it soon after. Edit: He was talking with power crystals to see if the tool could be improved but I've heard little since. Xerxes17 fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 00:50
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My name does not involve capital letters I will not stand for this slander  I got and answered a number of questions. To my knowledge he has nothing he's waiting for me on now that it can do list-of-list types and match on references, so your guess is as good as mine.
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Aug 17, 2016 01:06
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power crystals posted:My name does not involve capital letters I will not stand for this slander You got documentation for the tool or should I start combing through your posts when I decide to knuckle down?
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Aug 17, 2016 01:19
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xthetenth posted:You got documentation for the tool or should I start combing through your posts when I decide to knuckle down? No, but largely because nobody's ever asked. I'll see what I can do.
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Aug 17, 2016 01:24
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Doublepostin' but I got excited and since you're the one that asked, here's a first draft of very badly formatted notes on how to actually write patches for this thing. Let me know if anything's confusing or seems to be missing. The patcher uses XML files as its input to describe what to do. XML could in short be described as being composed of Elements and Attributes, like so: code:For more detail on XML in general, the internet has you covered. Remember that the patcher download includes several example patch files which cover common use cases. General notes: As time has gone on, I have added new attributes to things that previously didn't have them. When this happens, I update the tool to default to whatever the old case was, but warn you that you should be explicit now. There is no support for matching based on instance ID. These numbers change with every build, so that would defeat the entire point, which is to allow you to not care which build you're working against. Unless otherwise specified, assume all names and values specified are case-sensitive. The document The root element should be named "<wargamepatch>" and has no attributes. Each <wargamepatch> can have 0 to N elements, though one with 0 isn't exactly useful. All elements have three potential attributes:
Adding instances The first possible element is <ndfcreate> (<ndfadd> is accepted as a synonym, which I added at some point when I couldn't remember which it was, and since I don't want to break backwards compatibility it stays). This will create a new instance in the specified table. It requires no additional information to do this. Example: code:The second is <ndfdelete>. It deletes instances from the specified table. It accepts a <matchconditions> element as its child, though this is not mandatory if you for some reason want to wipe out an entire table. <matchconditions> is explained below. Example: code:Changing instances The third and most important is <ndfpatch>. <ndfpatch> is used to change values on existing ndf instances. It has two children - <matchconditions> and <changes>. Matching instances <matchconditions> instructs the patcher to filter a table. It can be omitted if you want to change every instance. <matchconditions> in turn contains 0 to N <matchcondition> elements. It will start with the entire specified table. Each time a <matchcondition> is processed, any instances that do not match the specified criteria are discarded from the list. If a <matchconditions> is somewhere that expects exactly one instance (such as setting a reference) and it returns 0 or 2+, a warning will be issued. <matchcondition> has three attributes:
For type "property", the patcher will require that instances' specified property equals the specified value. Note that this currently does not support indexed types (i.e. it can't match Lists or MapLists right now). It can match complex types. It also has the following "special" values for the property attribute that only exist in the patcher's context:
code:code:Example: code:Specifying changes <changes> describes what the patch is going to actually do. It contains 0 to N <change> elements, though a <changes> with no <change>s will issue a warning that you probably forgot to do something. <change> has four attributes:
The various operations do various things as described below. In alphabetical order:
I will make a special example here for the nested list context, as described in passing for the select and unselect operations. For this I'm going to shamelessly borrow an example patch from RangerPL: code:Basically, think of "select" as zooming in, and "unselect" as zooming back out. If it makes you feel any better, this was so confusing to program that it took me literally years to get around to doing it. NDF types Finally, a discussion of types. These are what you specify as the type attribute to the add and set operations. The NDF format supports a number of types, which I have mostly arbitrarily grouped as follows: Primitive types These are single values that stand alone and require no other information.
Complex types These require multiple values to properly describe. ObjectReference - A reference to another ndf instance. The value specified is as follows: code:Map - A single map (not a MapList!), with a key and a value. This has a special syntax as follows: code:There are other complex types that the patcher currently doesn't parse (such as the various vector/tuple types). If you need this, let me know. Indexed types The List and MapList are special cases in that they can contain other things. Creating either is actually very easy - you don't need a value at all, as they don't have anything that could be understand to be their one, single value. Example: code:Putting all that together, here's one of my test patches so you can see most of the syntax at work in one place: code:This is a very verbose file format, but it should ensure version-agnosticism unless Eugen changes things so drastically that the rules you tell it aren't valid anymore. e: oh god tables I'm so sorry
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Aug 17, 2016 02:39
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That's good documentation, I'll probably confuse myself once I get going though.
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Aug 17, 2016 03:01
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What did uralmod do?
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Aug 18, 2016 00:33
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StashAugustine posted:What did uralmod do? Kick rear end. It repriced command units dramatically and repriced tanks to make mid range tanks a lot cheaper so they can be a real backbone. There were also changes to infantry to make them more balanced, and generally some work to make the units a lot more balanced pricewise. I definitely want to make a cv cheapener at the very least.
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Aug 18, 2016 00:44
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IMO, the grand tank rebalance patch and patches since then have largely obsoleted Uralmod. We're now playing in the era of the 135pt T-72 '89 and 65pt T-80 and affordable command tnaks.
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Aug 18, 2016 02:05
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OctaMurk posted:IMO, the grand tank rebalance patch and patches since then have largely obsoleted Uralmod. We're now playing in the era of the 135pt T-72 '89 and 65pt T-80 and affordable command tnaks. Yeah, the tank changes aren't as necessary as they had been, but there's still some goofy infantry stuff to be found, and command units as a whole are priced to discourage actually taking ground.
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Aug 18, 2016 02:22
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 I originally announced this in this thread on Dec 31, 2014 00:01, so it took a while, but hey! Since AirLand Battle is the only one with coop campaign, I decided long time ago to atleast make the campaigns last a longer. This is the final campaign, the fourth one, in ALB. It can be played solo, coop or versus. It's called "The Nordic Escalation", and it _massively_ modifies the available units, the composition of decks fighting, and the amount of troops. Many decks have hundreds of tanks, infantry and tens of planes. This mod is in it for the long grind, where battlegroups can fight for an ingame day before a victor emerges, and in my opinion, greatly increased the enjoyability and longevity of the campaign. The target morale for NATO side is also increased, since it made no sense for the defender, who already has the innate bonus in itself, to have equal goals to the attacker. Time limit is 30 days. I also edited the name of the campaign, and the description. Carefully look at the decks you can purchase, since many of them are way more powerful, and many of their units have been switched. Aerial Recon was also made free. I could not have done any of this without dandywalken. This mod fucks up your ability to play ALB with anyone who doesn't have it. You can use steam cache verify to get rid of it. There are important house rules here, though. The AI difficulty should be Very Hard, and the border tiles on the campaign should not be touched by NATO. PACT needs them to function correctly, since it can't retreat it's battlegroups to "outside of map", and will get instadestroyed, which makes zero sense when there are 50 MIGs and 100 T80s left in it. You can sometimes force retreat a healthy battlegroup outside the map and just get rid of them in an exploitative way. NATO should not step on these tiles: Namsos, Stromsund, Kiel, Ornskoldsvik Dandywalken taught me wargame modding from the scratch. I am none the wiser, but at least I know some french words now! Thanks so much. Download here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6J0NFxo-WK-U3NDLTNvblc2MzQ/view?usp=sharing Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 16:21
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xthetenth posted:Yeah, the tank changes aren't as necessary as they had been, but there's still some goofy infantry stuff to be found, and command units as a whole are priced to discourage actually taking ground. I actually like the way uralmod kinda pushed for its gameplay because the cheap as chips tanks allowed for a more aggressive, meatgrinder style tank gameplay that made the game pretty exciting beyond the first five minutes. I enjoyed 1984(for ALB) mod in the way it doled out reinforcements- instead of getting a trickle, you got a lump sum every few minutes and the unit roster, much pared down pretty much mandated using line units through availability.
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Aug 22, 2016 17:09
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Vahakyla posted:~awesome mod talk~ This is pretty cool, will definitely give this a play through soon, you mentioned this being the 4th campaign? Do you mean there are 3 built in with the game and this adds to them or have you built 3 before this? If the latter, do you have links to the other 3?
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Aug 22, 2016 19:57
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This replaces the 4th vanilla one
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Aug 22, 2016 20:04
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Uralmod seems to be working again with the tweaks mentioned here: http://forums.eugensystems.com/viewtopic.php?f=187&t=45797&start=1260 Or is this not a complete fix? quote:Firstly, many thanks to authors for they work. quote:"I have tried to use this however it does not seem to want to work. I have unpacked it, placed the installer conig and ran the installer.bat. It will install and say it is complete, however only the pictures will change and not the information, costs or names. Looking for some help, don't mind losing NL, would like to play the mod."
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Aug 23, 2016 03:04
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That'll make it work but without any of the Dutch stuff. Edit: Hey I totally missed the conversation above. Yeah, I wasn't waiting for power crystals, I was just lazy. That said I'm on vacation from work this week so I've put some  in and managed to rewrite a few things in XML format. This should hopefully make the mod patch- and DLC-proof.And here's a tiny piece of the revived mod: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3766742/NDF_Win_Ural3.dat The (modest) list of changes is as follows: Command units' prices reduced. As a rule of thumb, price is price of base vehicle + 25p. Infantry costs 25p Units 1981-1986 added to Cat C decks, units 1987-1991 added to Cat B Cat C set to 1986, Cat B set to 1991 Rafale: Intro year set to 1995 USA: Motorized decks enabled for Cat C US LAV-25 Made capable of transporting infantry Marines (90): LAV-25 added to transport options SMAW: LAV-25 added to transport options We've started over so these are changes from vanilla. None of the other old stuff is in this version, but the new Cat B/C should be fun. The goal is to get as close to 100% XML for future versions of the mod so we don't get wiped out by a patch again RangerPL fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 24, 2016 20:53
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Anyone got a decent US armoured deck lying around? Or are tanks not suited for a beginner? 
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Aug 26, 2016 20:15
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RangerPL posted:That'll make it work but without any of the Dutch stuff. Where does the NDF file go?
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Aug 26, 2016 22:38
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